As Brooklyn Park Stalls, Fingers Point at Religious Group

There is little to indicate that the misshapen expanse of concrete, bounded by a chain-link fence and at times dusted with crumbling pieces of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs alongside it is, in fact, a city park. A few thousand feet west is one of New York’s glossiest green esplanades, the sprawling Brooklyn Bridge Park, alongside the East River in the same Dumbo neighborhood. But here, the only clue that the lot is not a car park or a stalled construction site is the green parks department sign proclaiming Bridge Park 2.

How the park and two contiguous other parks came to be is a fairly straightforward story, involving the highway overhead that defined their irregular shapes. But how the park has remained in such sorry shape, bucking for over a decade the glittering gentrification all around, is murkier. Depending on whom you ask, it is the fault of flawed zoning, communication breakdowns or, most pointedly, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of the area’s biggest landowners and an insular, tax-exempt religious organization, who had promised to fix the parks but never did.

Now, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses prepare to move from the area, having put their headquarters and other land on the market last month for what could end up being $1 billion, the concrete patches have been remembered.

But criticism of the religious group seems as much a part of the debate as getting new playground equipment and play areas. The parks controversy seems to have exposed a long-simmering resentment of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, also known as the Watchtower, for planning to leave a city that has enriched the religious group exponentially, community leaders say, yet to which it has given little in return.

“The Watchtower stands to make potentially hundreds of millions of dollars while generating no public benefits for residents of the surrounding neighborhoods,” said a letter sent to the group this week by Councilman Stephen Levin, a Democrat who represents the area, and signed by over a half-dozen community leaders. “It is unacceptable that since the Watchtower committed to work with the parks department, over 11 years have passed, the site has seen no improvements, and remains a piece of barren asphalt.”

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian group with 8.2 million members worldwide, agreed to fix up the park with the department as part of a deal with the city. The group had been granted a zoning change for its property at 85 Jay Street, permitting it to build a residential tower and event space on the lot. The Jehovah’s Witnesses tore down the low buildings on the block, but they never built the proposed tower.

Few seemed to notice that nearby, Bridge Park 2 continued to deteriorate for more than a decade, until last month. That was when the Jehovah’s Witnesses announced that 85 Jay Street was for sale, the 35,000-square-foot parcel made immensely more valuable by the zoning change.

“They are the biggest land tycoons in my neighborhood,” Doreen Gallo, the executive director of the Dumbo Neighborhood Alliance, said. “They got to flip commercial manufacturing land for residential developments and now they are flipping it again and leaving.”

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A plot where the group was supposed to a build a tower.CreditÁngel Franco/The New York Times

Richard Devine, the spokesman for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, said the group was committed to remaking the park, and rejected critics’ characterization of the organization, which has been in Brooklyn for around 100 years. “When no one was investing in the neighborhood and buildings were becoming decrepit, we were investing heavily in the neighborhood,” Mr. Devine said. “When you own properties for 50 or 100 years the value goes up. It just happens.”

Nevertheless, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses pack up to move to Warwick, N.Y., some neighborhood advocates, like Tucker Reed, the president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, are demanding they do more than just spruce up the park. Mr. Reed said they should give the city a percentage of whatever their real estate reaps. “These sales windfalls — and resulting development — make clear that it’s time for the Witnesses to give something back to the neighborhood that fostered their growth and bankrolled their future,” Mr. Reed wrote in an opinion piece in Crain’s New York.

Mr. Devine said the members already give back, citing a pocket park at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan, which he said they had improved and maintained. Changes in plans for Bridge Park 2, including a baseball diamond and a skate park, he said, are part of what has stymied the process.

The parks department offered a number of reasons for Bridge Park 2’s foundering, including a timeline of its interaction with the religious group, detailing what the department says were missed deadlines by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, including final plans that were never submitted.

“Despite the delays, NYC Parks is eager and willing to reignite discussions with Watchtower so to move forward with improvements to Bridge Park 2,” the department said in a statement.

Complicating the effort, perhaps, is that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had planned to use some volunteers to fix the park, said Sam Biederman, a spokesman for the department. Though it is a common practice for group members to volunteer, it may not be permissible in the city, Mr. Biederman said.

In any event, with those volunteers busy in Warwick, the group was looking into making a financial contribution to finish the project, Mr. Devine, the spokesman, said. “We realized that we were stretched,” he said.

On a recent weekday, William Green, the custodian of the bridge parks, stood in a corner of Bridge Park 2, where a yellow jungle gym had been erected in recent years. He pointed to orange cones he had placed to keep people away from debris falling from the highway and the gaps in the rubber play surfaces. The shabby park is nonetheless host to birthday parties for children from the nearby housing projects, he said.

“They are talking about coming here and doing some work in this park,” Mr. Green said. “That’s all they’re doing is talking.”

He looked across the concrete before him and shook his head. “These are not parks,” Mr. Green said. “They are just big old spaces.”